In industry it is frequently desired to deliver highly toxic, unstable material in vapor form to devices or substrate materials within a high vacuum system. It is necessary to periodically service such devices for cleaning or replacement of parts and to refill or replace the vapor sources and perform maintenance service. Each instance of refilling or service requires disengagement and re-engagement of vacuum seals and performance of re-qualification tests to ensure safety.
A particularly important example of such vapor delivery, having many stringent requirements, is the handling of doping materials for production of semiconductor devices. In this case it is necessary to produce vapor streams at accurately controlled flow from highly toxic solid materials that have low vapor pressure at room temperature. This requires careful heating of the solids to produce sublimation, and careful handling of the vapors because of risks of disassociation, unwanted condensation in the flow path and reaction of the vapors if brought in contact with other substances. Provisions to ensure personnel safety are also required. Improved systems for such vapor delivery are needed.
In particular there is need for improved vapor delivery for ion beam implantation systems in which the vapors ionized in an ion source produce an ion beam which is accelerated, mass-analyzed, and transported to a target substrate. With such ionization systems, it is especially desired to meet all requirements while prolonging the uptime, i.e. the time between required servicing. An advantageous way of doing this is by providing in situ cleaning of components of the system using highly reactive agents, but this introduces further safety concerns.
There is also need for safe and reliable vapor delivery systems that enable the same equipment to be employed with a number of different source materials that have differing vaporization temperatures.
There is further a need for a way to progress efficiently and safely from delivery of feed material obtained from a vendor to connection to a vapor receiving system of a vaporizer charged with the feed material. It is preferable that this be done in a standardized manner, to ensure familiarity to personnel.
Among the situations having all of the foregoing needs is the case of providing flows of decaborane and octadecaborane vapor, and vapor of carboranes, to an ion source at flows suitable to perform ion beam implantation to produce boron implants.
The needs also arise, more generally, in providing vapor flows of large molecules for semiconductor manufacturing. Examples include vapor flows: of large molecules for n-type doping, e.g. of arsenic and phosphorus; of large molecules of carbon for co-implanting processes in which the carbon inhibits diffusion of an implanted doping species, or getters (traps) impurities, or amorphizes crystal lattice of the substrate; of large molecules of carbon or other molecules for so-called “stress engineering” of crystal structure (e.g., to apply crystal compression for PMOS transistors, or crystal tension for NMOS transistors); and of large molecules for other purposes including reduction of the thermal budget and unwanted diffusion during annealing steps in semiconductor manufacture.
These needs apply to implementations employing ion beam implantation, and, where applicable, also to large molecule deposition of boron and other species for atomic layer deposition or producing other types of layers or deposits. Techniques for this may employ: plasma immersion, including PLAD (plasma doping), PPLAD (pulsed plasma doping) and PI3 plasma immersion ion implantation); atomic layer deposition (ALD); or chemical vapor deposition (CVD), for example.
The needs just described and the inventive aspects now to be described apply importantly to the manufacture of high density semiconductor devices at shallow depth in semiconductor substrates, including CMOS and NMOS transistors and memory ICs, in the manufacture of computer chips, computer memory, flat panel displays, photovoltaic devices, and other products.
Other procedures in industry involving the generation and delivery of vapors or process gases to a vapor or gas consuming device can also benefit from features presented here.